Heavy social drinkers score higher on implicit wanting and liking for alcohol than alcohol-dependent patients and light social drinkers

Abstract

Background and objectivesAutomatic hedonic (“liking”) and incentive (“wanting”) processes are assumed to play an important role in addiction. Whereas some neurobiological theories suggest that these processes become dissociated when drug use develops into an addiction (i.e., “liking” becomes weaker, whereas “wanting” becomes exaggerated; e.g., Robinson & Berridge, 1993), other theories suggest that there is a linear relationship between these two processes (i.e., both “liking” and “wanting” increase equally; e.g., Koob & Le Moal, 1997). Our aim was to examine “wanting” and “liking” in three groups of participants: alcohol-dependent patients, heavy social drinkers, and light social drinkers. MethodsParticipants performed two different single target implicit association tests (ST-IATs; e.g., Bluemke & Friese, 2007) and explicit ratings that were designed to measure “liking” and “wanting” for alcohol. ResultsOur results are in sharp contrast with the theories of both Robinson and Berridge and Koob and Le Moal: heavy drinkers had higher scores than light drinkers and alcohol-dependent patients on both the wanting ST-IAT and the liking ST-IAT. There were no differences between alcohol-dependent patients and light drinkers. Explicit ratings mirrored these results. LimitationsThese findings suggest that our ST-IATs are not valid measures of “wanting” and “liking”. Instead, they might assess more complex knowledge regarding participants' experiences and goals. ConclusionsThese findings suggest that the relationship between drug consumption and appetitive drug associations is not linear, highlighting the importance of testing both sub-clinical and clinical samples in future research.